


amuse-bouche

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [275]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angband, Dinner at Angband is a thing here, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Just Morgoth and Mairon and awful conversation, Morgoth being the worst and enjoying it, POV First Person, Unreliable Narrator, extreme creepiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:20:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25439098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Morgoth's gaze moves.
Relationships: Fingon | Findekáno & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fingon | Findekáno & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Maedhros | Maitimo & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor & Sauron | Mairon
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [275]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	amuse-bouche

**Author's Note:**

> Amuse-bouche: a little bit of food served before dinner to stimulate the appetite.  
> From the French, literally: (it) entertains (the) mouth

Mairon’s first flaw, more permanent than an eye or an eye’s loss, was his tendency for mad stasis of the mind and soul. He is a shallow grave of a man; everything that is or was ever in him may be freshly turned over in the space of a few moments. If he has not the element of surprise to render his victims fearful, trembling, he really has nothing at all. One must put a knife in his hand, to make his hand a weapon. One must lead him on with scraps of meat, one must lead him to a place itself unburied. Under the open sky, one might then say,

 _Mairon, tell me your name_.

And he would try, and fail, to remember that he was a child once—even though, in looking at him, youth was readily apparent. Haggard features, maybe, but a simple cant to his expression. Hatred, and desire—the oldest knives of all.

I know him very well.

My anger was somewhat drained from me, like pus from an untidy boil, when I hollowed out the mess of his socket (and drew from _him_ a few lamentations for good measure). Since his recovery, he wears a patch over the offending emptiness, and when I am not overseeing the reconstruction of our mutual future—of our future which is greater than him, and perhaps greater than me—we dine together.

We dine, and he frets in that feral way of his, and I consider, without anger, his flaws.

“Mairon,” I say, slivering beef into quivering filaments, “Was it love?”

He does not understand the question. He told me everything he knew, when he could speak coherently. I told myself everything I thought I had known. In point of foolish truth, it was…surprisingly insufficient.

Now I am punished. Whipped at the heels of my visions. _Was it love_ , knocks in the corners of the dark room that is my mind. _Love or a calculus of power? Both are fleshly creations, capable of being pierced by poison._

 _Fingon_ , Mairon said. _The one called Fingon saved him._

Insufficient, Fingolfin always seemed. Him and his dark-pated children, ugly clay-formed shadows in the wake of Feanorian gold.

I open my eyes, for I have held them closed, letting them swim in deep and promising waters. “The one called Fingon.”

“Yes.” Mairon does not know love, but he recognizes the tendrils of our prior conversations. Both fear and fascination guides his memory. I was less than gentle with him, when he was a boy—and I am still surprised that my occasional harshness meant anything.

What is a cuff to the side of the head, when the head has (had) two eyes, which have, in turn, overseen the flow of lifeblood?

“Did our runaway dog call him so, when you found them?”

“He could scarcely speak.” Mairon’s one eye blinks and flames. “But yes. His mouth said Fingon.”

I separate the strands of cooked meat with my tongue against my teeth before I ask another question.

“And had you heard that name before?”

He watches me. I am his master. Before Maitimo was my dog, Mairon was. And as he only has one eye remaining, so also do I have only one cur. _Eat of the scraps of my table_ , I think and murmur. _Eat from my hand._

“Yes,” Mairon answers.

I ponder _Fingon_ for a long time.

The brightest of birds have humble, lowly mates. Whatever may have passed between them—and I know Maitimo to be capable of the basest proclivities—Fingon was, at least, his confidant and friend.

 _Friend_. A strange, unsavory word. A scrap of sopped bread for a pink-gummed child, or a creature turned fangless by age.

Fingon is not of Finwe’s first line. Fingon is not beautiful. Thus I have never cared for Fingon, for what contributions his mind or body could make to my establishments.

I must go back—back.

Finwe’s first bride is as yet unknown to me. Irish in blood. Some of Feanor’s bones must have been hers, some of his spark and madness. Finwe was, of course, so terribly sane. Lustful, yes: he found a second wife, and sired two more sons, before his first was long cold in the ground.

The eldest of Finwe’s sons knows little about being cold in the ground. His grave upturned; his head severed. I retire and send Mairon to whatever quarters he chooses to keep, and I stroke Feanor’s cool pate with my nails in my windowed chamber, the whole of it pitched black with night. 

“Fingon,” I repeat. “Fingolfin.” Names quite alike, father and son. Alike and Irish and strange. But they were stolid fellows! Not only did I see them from afar, I _spoke_ once to that son. I stood before his little table and told him that all he knew was founded, builded, glorified upon a lie.

 _A good doctor does not see anyone in_ need _of redemption, when he is busy tending to their ills._

“Hello, Fingon,” I say, in the dark. He cannot hear me, but he is not far from here. If Fingon came, and came for Maedhros, I know they have gone to Mithrim.

Blast and disappearance. Smoke rising. Ulfang’s bloated corpse, cast out for the crows—

Yes, I know well that Mithrim stands.

“Did you know him when you saw him, my lad?” I tap his uncle’s skull; I doubt very much whether he loved his uncle. “Your pretty Maitimo, without his chequered trousers and waving hair? Did you weep to find yourself so very wrong about redemption?”

I wonder how he took the hand, and how it affected him to do so. But I will not ask those questions of thin air.

_And had you heard that name before?_

_Yes._

_When?_

This whole room, I own, still bears his mark. My wingless angel, who never chanced his flight. There, he first lifted his head. There, his head was shorn. There, the shorn hair was swept away. I see how it all interlinks; a chain of our making, his and mine. We made so many possibilities. We were everything his father feared without even knowing he feared it.

Feanor was not at the farmstead that night. He did not see me choose his scepter, and my throne.

Mairon said, wiping his fingers amidst his many-shaded furs, _When I cut his father’s name in him_ ,

And I asked—

 _He called for Fingon,_ then _?_

Not for Feanor. He did not call for his father, when Mairon bound them in blood. He called for Fingon, and begged Fingon as if the plain-faced boy was before him.

All this, while Mairon did what I beat him for thereafter, marking and burning and tearing. Strange, that a name—a near-stranger’s name—should fit so firmly amongst those screams.

I said, moistening my meat with a little wine,

(libations and a burnt offering)

“He thought himself a dead man, you know.”

Mairon knows. Oh, by my might, Mairon knows _that_.

Afterwards, I forget Mairon’s rage, if only because I scarcely knew it. He is afraid of me. He always has been. But it is no matter; that passes for love, with him.

Yet Maedhros—what of Maedhros? They are not the same dog. Feanor’s diamond son, I now comprehend beyond doubt’s faintest shadow, loved plain faces.

First he loved his mother, who stood between us, and should have died for it. Then his half-blood cousin, who split his bones and left me bones for the picking.

Maybe he loves Fingolfin, too.

I chuckle over the prospect of Fingolfin. I set Fingolfin’s brilliant brother’s half-skull aside, and leave my war-room for the night. I do only half of my best thinking here. The rest is done in my chamber, with or without the pipe.

So. I have an embarrassment of bone-riches.

I have a soft-hearted, hot-blooded ghost.

 _You betray your father, Maitimo_ , I think, and I shake my head. _You betray him by your meekness, by your love for what he grew beyond._

Betrayed and reviled; stripped and maimed. Somehow this ghost, such as he is, has kept his friends.

How does one pick at _that_? It is, I assure myself, an honest question. I took one from the fold and chose as a god would a hero: six-foot-odd, shoddy with arrogance, whole and careless. Then, by all proper metrics, I bent and broke him. Yet he surged against me again, a great wave of the disorder he should have learned to loathe, not once but twice.

At the time, I thought those efforts to be in Feanor’s honor. I thought that rebellion to be a father-flame, not quite burnt out.

But it would seem that such defiance lives beyond Feanor and Feanor’s line. How else should Fingolfin and his kits survive the journey west? I know a little of their travels. I made some trouble for them where I could.

Still, they survived. They made some trouble for me. They kept to their path like faithful fools; to Feanor’s path in both destination and violence. I vow that that shall be met and accounted for.

But what of the one who went where Feanor would not? What of the one who returned for a body, for a ghost?

“Tell me, Fingon. Why did you come for him so soon? So boldly? And _alone_?”

_Alone_ , Mairon had gasped, admitting it almost as soon as he could speak. I had a pincer in the soft flesh of his upper cheek, of course, to prompt the admission. _He was alone._

And Maitimo-Maedhros, dead to my future and his past, fought Ulfang alone. Plotted against Gothmog and myself, in essence alone. He did so by necessity, as well as for honor.

This Fingon was driven by something that _might_ be honor.

But a doctor does not redeem.

I smile. I blink into the arc of night.

I say,

“You told me _that_ yourself.”


End file.
